21 December 2014

After a long hiatus, this post is authored by Jonti – he's written some memories of our first trip to the States.

...

First I gave Nija a tour of Washington D.C., her nation’s capital.

Now she’d like me to write on her blog about our trip to D.C. and Atlanta together – which I am delighted to do.

When we first met, many years months ago, we were both excited about exploring and re-discovering Manchester with someone else. To see the city through their eyes. I found Nija – a non-Manchester native – who loved Manchester even more than me and during about 18 months – through dissertation-writing and job-hunting and a wedding – we did exactly that: re-discovered this northern city through each other’s eyes.

When we first met, I could not imagine that we would re-discover Atlanta, her home city, together too. Finally, this August we went for our first trip. Here are a few impressions.

We stopped off in Washington D.C. to visit Nija’s grandmother and her Aunt and Uncle.
Here is Nija with Ba.

By day, we wandered around the monuments walking off our jet-lag. I had been a couple of times to Washington and was a hardened Mall-walker. Nija hadn’t really spent any time there so I gave her a tour.

The Washington Monument had recently re-opened following the 2011 earthquake

Nija also showed me some things I hadn't seen before, at the botanical garden.

Of an evening in suburban Maryland, we would enjoy the company of Nija's family. They were incredibly generous & I had my first taste of gargantuan American restaurant portions. A salad is not a light option.

***

We flew down to Atlanta. Airport security was fortunately relaxed about me being ‘Small’ on my ticket but now a ‘Dalal-Small’ in my passport.

By the time we got to Atlanta we were on the right time zone and I was ready for my first Indian cookery class. Tanvi and Sanjay, Sahil and Sahana, all came around to Nija’s parents. Nija's mother cooked Dal Makhani (lentils, black lentils) and I tried to help.

Throughout the two weeks, we ate very well. Most spectacular was lacy lentils. (khandvi!)
This involved thinly spreading out a paste made of yogurt & lentils, and cooling it over the table.

Here they are laying it out:

With all the eating so well, it was lucky that the neighbourhood swimming pool was just a short walk away.

I could also play tennis with Nija's niece & nephew (reassuringly, even though they had recently won a state-wide competition, I was able to emerge victorious – though not, I suspect, for long).

I’d been warned that Atlanta is a very car-friendly city but one wonderful highlight was an antidote to the car – the late-summer lantern parade. Taking place along and celebrating the Beltline – a walking, cycling, running route which is gradually being opened up – we stood in the warm early autumn evening and watched the thousands of creative lanterns.

Also to stretch our legs we went to ‘hot’ yoga (somewhat strangely, given the sweltering Southern heat outside. In fact, it wasn’t all that hot – at least not as hot as Northern England’s hot yoga.)

The studio was in Marietta – the closest, quaintest town to Nija’s parents – where the old library is now a flower shop and a vintage cinema shows re-runs of To Kill a Mocking Bird. The general store stocked wine glasses made out of old bottles and had a fridge of local craft beer which we’d take back and drink of an evening sitting on the deck with Nija’s parents.

During yoga, the railroad rattled past, shaking the walls. The showers were in the process of being built – sometimes noisily to accompany the serenity of the class – and one of the teacher’s hamstrings snapped once – but we had a fabulous time. Best of all at the studio, we encountered people who were just extraordinarily thrilled that we were there, in their town, in their studio.

Even riding around in the car we were always entertained. I’d been told about the ‘big chicken’, a towering KFC landmark.

However my favourite was this restaurant, a fish place that seemed not to mind implying that this was the place to gobble up Flipper –

17 August 2014

I guess America does have a lot of music festivals - but they seem to me, at least, to be a particularly British thing to do. To go, for several days, to a huge campsite, and sleep in tents only feet away from other people sleeping in tents... it's something I never did in the States.

I tried, once, in Australia, and failed miserably.

But British people love a festival. I know several who will spend hundreds of pounds, on a single festival ticket EVERY YEAR to go to Glastonbury - which, remember, is 5 days long. Your food, drink, travel there and back... are not included in the ticket price.

In The Dark Radio is a collective of radio enthusiasts (you know, people like me!) who run listening events. I've been running it in Manchester for a few months, now - it's a great way to make other people geek out on radio.

Jonti and I approached it as a sort-of-cheap holiday. I had to do some hours at the In the Dark hut, he had to buy an actual ticket, but other than that, I definitely recommend Latitude.

We organised a car-share to get there with some strangers. That could have gone poorly, I suppose, but we got lucky. Annette & Sonu are people we'd actually like to be friends with.

We got our lovely new tent up the first afternoon.

The sky over Henham Park, in Suffolk. Latitude is in one of the many beautiful parts of England.

The In the Dark Radio hut was built by an artist collective called Morning.

You are not supposed to squat on the swings like this guy did. You are supposed to swing gently and listen hard to the excellent radio we play into the hut.

I'm sure I do not need to tell you why this is adorable. I'm also sure that you, too, despair at the Oxford Online Dictionary's decision to include 'adorbs' as a word.

It rained a bit on Friday night, but by the time we were festivalling again, the rain had drained away.At some point on Saturday, Jonti and I needed some time alone together, not with 35,000 other festival go-ers, and we headed back to the tent just to get some quiet alone-time. When you are willing to lay in a boiling hot, bright, humid tent in the middle of the day, you are in serious need of quiet alone-time.

On Saturday night, though, there was an enormous storm. Because we had a lovely new tent (see above), the storm was intense, but it was not in tents. LOL.We had scheduled a late night 'adults-only' radio session on Saturday night - Nina, the director of In the Dark, had it on her laptop & iPhone. As we all showed up at the hut, shivering and soaked through, we tried to plug in Nina's iPhone. It was water-damaged and wouldn't work. We tried to plug in her laptop. It didn't really want to work. Finally, we got the night playing, but our hut was just filled with drunk people sheltering from the storm. They didn't want to hear it. We wanted to get back to our tents, get dry & get into bed.We stopped the event early. Thank goodness. I trudged back through the mud and rain, hoping the tent was dry, and not entirely sure that I would sign up for a festival again, to be honest. But apart from the storm on Saturday night, we were lucky with the weather.

And we got to see and do some very fun things. One of our favourite bands, Future Islands, played, and we got right up to the front row. Hozier & Haushka, both bands we hadn't heard and fell in love with... We saw the Royal Shakespeare Company do Revolt, She Said, Revolt, which was powerful and incredible.We saw Arthur Smith do his comedy/storytelling bit with Leonard Cohen songs, and it was truly wonderful. Until the bit at the end where a grown man came hopping out of back stage with a mask on and nothing else. Until that bit, I was very charmed by this show... And Jon Ronson gave a quirky Jon Ronson-style talk.As we were packing up the tent on Monday morning, I thought, yeah, I'd probably do it again. Bring on Glastonbury!--Side note: This time next week, I'll be visiting you Atlanta lot. Get ready! I can't wait to see y'all! I can't wait for you to meet Jonti!

14 July 2014

First Draft is one of Manchester’s excellent monthly events – it slants toward theatre, so it’s slightly different to the literature & story-heavy nights I often go to. Abi & Rachel, the organisers, invite performers of all stripes – theatre, yes, but also comedy, music, literature – to try out material early, before it’s polished, before it’s perfect. It’s not for some sort of art school-style submission to criticism from the group – rather, it’s because the first draft can be the most exciting draft.

It’s the draft that, after months of re-drafting and cutting and adding and cutting again, ends up actually being 2 stories & 1 novel & 3 other stories besides which really belong in the bin. It’s the hit and miss draft. Or sometimes, it’s just the miss draft.

For example:

Abi’s invited me to do a few First Draft nights, and I’ve found them really useful. My first time, I worked very hard on not working very hard on the story I was telling. I wrote the story on a Sunday, walked onstage on the Monday and read out the first draft of my story almost completely unedited.

It was the fastest I’ve ever given up on a story in my life. Ordinarily, if I’m writing a story, but it’s not working, I wrestle with it for weeks or months before I’ll finally admit there’s something wrong with how I’m writing it. It takes me ages to think maybe I’m trying to stick too many stories into one, or layering too many wonky metaphors... and only then will I leave it to be picked over for scraps to weave into later stories. But getting up and reading that story – out loud, to strangers & early – made me recognize it for what it was. A miss draft.

ANYWAY

The lovely folks over at First Draft have expanded on the ‘This One Book’ blog trail, which keen readers will remember from this post.

They invited me to contribute to their ‘This One Night’ blog trail, wherein, I will tell you about a live performance that has been significant to me. Read the first installment of “This One Night” on the First Draft blog, a beautifully told tale of Abi’s first Macbeth.

Here I go:

Until very recently, live performance, especially theatre, has never held much interest for me.

Partly, this is down to Bob-Fosse-based trauma (“Oh, no, they’re coming off the stage. Into the audience. No. Oh, please don’t throw the glitter at me… Oh, no. Oh, please, please oh the spandex. Oh, no no no.”)

And terrible musicals.

Image from: www.goodspeed.org/productions/2006/pippin

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve seen some amazing productions. Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth in St Peter’s for the Manchester International Festival was brilliant. Daniel Kitson’s Tree: stunning, funny, harsh. The Confederacy of Dunces: fantastic. As a kid, I really flipping loved theatre magic. My sister once made the mistake of taking me to a Penn and Teller show – I spent hours that night telling my parents what the tricks looked like, in an attempt to figure out how they worked. Magicians will tell you: that is the wrong way to go about it. What a trick looks like has nothing to do with how it works.

Generally, cinema has been more my style. Cinema feels more immersive – the camera follows characters, rather than characters presenting themselves on a stage. I like edits: I like that I don’t have to actually watch a character storm out of a room and slam the door. I like that the actors won’t notice if I think it’s terrible and walk out halfway.

ANYWAY

Jonti & I had travelled to Glasgow to see it at The Citizens Theatre – one of Jonti’s best mates, Phill Breen, was the director. Jonti had told me Phill was amazing. I was expecting something rather theatre-y.

The curtains opened on True West. I gasped. For the next two hours (or so, I can’t remember how long it was) I forgot that I was watching a stage, that there were real people presenting themselves as characters on a stage & that walking might ever be a thing I would want to do again.

Image by Pete Le May petelemay.co.uk

I just watched, transported, immersed.

Written by Sam Shepherd, True West is the story of two brothers – one an uptight do-gooder and the other a complete disaster – who are pent up in their mother’s house for a weekend. The do-gooder tries to write a play. The disaster, with no small threat of violence, horns in on the play. The do-gooder eventually loses his shit and nearly strangles the disaster. And then their Zoloft-happy mother comes home.

Throughout the play, Breen ratcheted up the tension between the brothers to unbearable levels – the house seethed with neuroses, thinly guised contempt and frayed tempers. The stage design, which included a ceiling, floor and three full walls, made the house feel claustrophobic & airtight.

I’ve never seen a ceiling built onto a stage before. Usually, lighting rigs are up there. The ceiling enhanced the claustrophobia, but it also meant Breen’s lighting designer had to get damn creative.

08 July 2014

John Gall's original cover design for the Vintage edition, reissued in 2005.This cover design was never used - it was too suggestive.

Recently Dan Carpenter started a blog trail (over here). He
shared the story of a book that changed how he thought about books and writing,
when he was around 14 or 15. And he invited two other bloggers to share their
stories of the books that changed them as adolescents.

The idea was based on
the formative nature of our early teenage years & how, sometimes, a book
read at the right time will shape the way you think about books and change your
brain forevermore. It’s certainly true that some books must be read at a
specific age or time in your life to mean much to you. I read Fahrenheit 451 in my 20s – it was way
too late & I found it adolescent & tedious. I read Animal Farm when I was 12, and I was like, ‘WHOA. SATIRE.’ I’m sure
it wouldn’t feel like that if I were to read it again.

Simon Sylvester & Dave Hartley took up Dan’s challenge –
and Dave invited Ben Judge and me. I have taken quite some time thinking over this. Because, while Animal Farm introduced me to satire, it
hasn’t really affected how I think about literature or as a writer. Trust me, I
am no satirist. And as an adult, many books that I’ve read have influenced me
& changed how I think about literature (Kavalier
and Clay, House of Leaves).

But I’ve been trying to nail down which book deeply affected
me when I was a young teenager, when I was 14 or 15. I wasn’t able to just run
a finger across the spines of my book collection – at this point, my book
collection is scattered across two continents, in 3 basements & a seriously
overstuffed bookshelf. Oh, and some are propping my bed up to keep it from
breaking. Seriously.

Here’s the thing:

As a teenager, I was in advanced literature classes
throughout high school (ages 13-17). For the first year, it was fairly easy
going. We read a lot of shortish novels (Heart
of Darkness, The Metamorphosis, The Portrait of Dorian Gray) and extracts
from longer novels (Great Expectations).
We did a few weeks on poetry & a few weeks on grammar. I loved the few
weeks of poetry. I loved it so much I tried to write my own poetry. I loved the
alliteration & clever tricks of language. But my poems were terrible. I had
to stop writing poetry.

And then shit got real.

10th grade: we read a novel every fortnight &
wrote a paper on every one. (The Great
Gatsby, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman)

11th grade: we read 10 Shakespeare plays &
wrote a paper on every one. Some of them were easy (Romeo & Juliet, Twelfth Night). But some of them weren’t (Richard III).

12th grade: we read a novel every week &
wrote a paper on every one. (Crime and
Punishment, Catch-22, The Grapes of Wrath, Tess of the D’urbervilles)

We had reading lists for the summer holidays (usually about
6 books) and a paper was due on one of them for
the first day of class. I had 6 other classes to attend every day, with
their own Advanced Placement statuses & their own ridiculous amounts of
homework. To clarify: AP Biology, AP Spanish, AP History, as well as 12th
grade maths, chorus & another class that I don’t remember now.

This sort of education ensures that I have read more of the
‘classics’ (don’t let’s start) than many of my British peers. It ensured that I
easily earned highest marks on my Advanced Placement exam – I got really good
at reading & comprehending vast sections of text quickly, picking out a
major theme, finding a few quotes & passages to back up my argument about
said theme, and writing a paper about that book damn fast. I still appreciate
this education – I like having the skills to understand the book behind the
plot. But it came at a price.

By the end of 12th grade, I could read a book and
analyse a book within 2 hours. In fact, I was analyzing it as I read it. I never properly read a book; I was just sifting
through them for themes/passages/quotes that I could use for the paper I’d have
to write the next day.

Many of those books affected me deeply – I have re-read some
in more recent years – and I still find them moving and wonderful and resonant.
But at the time of first reading, I was simply a bulldozer, ploughing through
words, powered by a relentless curriculum.

It wasn’t until later – the summer after high school, I was
nearly 18 – that I got my ‘this one book.’

Nabokov’s Lolita

That summer, for the first time, I had the leisure to read,
re-read, absorb and truly relish my reading – but not all the books I read that
summer (ahem. Harry Potter) mattered
like this one. For Humbert Humbert and for me, Lolita changed everything.

-----

Well-spoken, well-written English is revered round my house.
I didn’t start saying “y’all” and “ain’t” until I had moved out & was
nearly 20 – it was a quiet rebellion, as I slowly allowed my mouth to take in
and form and create the Southern accent & colloquialisms I’d never been
allowed to have at home.

Perhaps well-spoken, well-written English is revered round
my house because my parents were born just as the British were wrested from
India – and empire has a slow way of diminishing in hearts and minds, if not in
land and influence. English, I remember being told, is the most expressive of
all languages because it has more words
than any other language & whenever it doesn’t have a word for something, it
gladly makes one up.

Or maybe well-spoken, well-written English is revered round my house because it
isn’t in great quantity. We are a bilingual family and it seems our English is
all mixed up em-thhem Gujurati ne Hindi
sathe. Though English is not my first language, I did well at school &
I’ve never had much trouble with English – but I never thought I’d be able to
write it all that well. I had one too many languages in my head & being
able to write well meant, in my mind, knowing one language (preferably English)
extremely well. To write, one must be expert in English – to be expert in
English, one should probably not have a Gujurati/Hindi-based confusion between,
say, ‘turn off’ and ‘close’ or between, maybe, ‘tall’ and ‘long.’

(I regularly ask my husband to close the light & I often
notice, in passing, that that stranger across the street is very long. He must
be at least 6’6”.)

But then. Lolita.

From its first poetic sentence to its
first-person oh-so-entirely-unreliable narrator to its achingly, head-shakingly clever tricks
of deception, etymology & pronunciation, Lolita
had me.

With its repetition, its way of playing with the Russian sounds in
English words, its crafted, lyrical language, Lolita had me.

Nabokov became some sort of multi-lingual hero to me. He
apologises, at the beginning of the book, for any poor English he displays. English,
he explains, is not his first language. He apologises, in essence, for using
English better than most monolingual writers of English.

Lolita taught me that I could be poetic without being a
poet, and I could write well even though I was bilingual – that in fact, being
bilingual might even help.* **

I know Nabokov affected my writing, though I didn’t start
writing until over a decade later, because I still recognize my rather
unsuccessful attempts to emulate his lyricism and cleverness.

Lolita affected my
reading, too – for the first time, I enjoyed a ‘classic,’ lingering over the
pages, marveling at this particularly clever little rhyming dance, sighing over
that lovely turn of phrase, wistful and envious of the author’s skill. Humble
humburger and I were entirely unprepared for Lolita’s magic. I’ve never felt beauty in language quite like it
again.

24 May 2014

Neutral Milk Hotel have been one of my favourite bands for years. The sound of Jeff Mangum's voice always pulls me back to those late summer nights of 2005, when I would turn up 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,' close out the till, gush buckets of water across the coffee-stained floor, mop up the gritty grounds with bleach and hot water, and wonder where the hell I was going to end up in 10 years...

I remember those days, feeling lost. Like I wasn't doing anything useful... like I wasn't useful.

And Neutral Milk Hotel gave me something, every night, a wisp, a thread that held my heart together, those nights when I hated myself for losing time, every night, to this goddamn mop bucket.

The band had already broken up, by the time I heard of them, so I never thought I'd see them live. Jeff Mangum, for some time, seemed like he might never pick up a guitar again.

But then he did. And the band reunited. They came to Manchester last week. Back in 2005, when I wondered where I'd be in 10 years, I never imagined the strange answers that have become the true ones: in Manchester. Working at the BBC. Married. Or married, but to someone that - back then - I hadn't even met yet.

How unbelievably my life has changed. How strange it is.

The show was amazing. It made my heart swell. It made me so glad to be alive, in this time, in this place. How lucky I am to get to see Neutral Milk Hotel in the Albert Hall, a perfect venue for them, big and beautiful, with stained glass and a huge organ.

For the past few months, I've been involved in this contemporary theatre project, called "Summer." It's not a play, but it is a performance, and honestly, I'm not really sure what it is - except that it is about being alive and about just being.

I'm one of the performers, along with about 30 other people, who are all different ages (the youngest is 18 months old, I think, and the oldest person I've met in it is in her 70s).

This is Cristina. She's in Summer, too.

Rehearsals have been strange, but in a fun way - a lot of walking around and working out how to interpret the sometimes-strange instructions they give us ("Walk, sit, run, lay down, or jump in lanes. When I tell you, you can walk, sit, run, lay down, or jump in grids.). For the photoshoot, they threw water on us. It is sometimes a totally ridiculous way to spend an afternoon... you can read more about it on Creative Tourist.

All Quarantine ask of us is to be ourselves - and the performance is based around all of our personal stories & lives. Between the Neutral Milk Hotel show and Summer, I've found myself daydreaming a lot this week - going over memories of summers past, who I used to be (quite hard on people), and who I still am (quite hard on myself).

Jonti and I have been packing all of life into our evenings. Apart from Saturday rehearsals & work, we have seen 2 concerts (Neutral Milk Hotel & Benjamin Brooker) and a play. On Tuesday, we went to Aumbry, an amazing restaurant near Manchester. We had a five-course tasting menu, and it was stunning. One of my dishes was too salty, but apart from that, it was absolutely delicious and surprisingly unfussy food.

That night, Jonti and I talked about being friends to people and building friendships with people, and being hard on people and being hard on ourselves. He said to me, "With friends, there will always be moments of good will, and there will always be moments of ill will. There will always be moments of cruelty and moments of kindness. That's what we do."

How strange it is, how lucky I am, to be married to this amazing man, who has so much empathy that he sees even ill will, even from his friends, as part of the flow of life.

11 May 2014

Sometimes, it feels like I have so much to tell you all about, I get overwhelmed by it. And I avoid writing it. And then more happens that I want to tell you. It's a vicious cycle.

I apologise. That's just a cliche. This cycle really isn't all that vicious. Because it's a blogging cycle, and really, it can't get vicious.

Since I last posted, my family came to visit me. The big six: my mom & dad, my sister & brother-in-law, my niece & nephew. It was really important to me that my sister saw Manchester, my new home. I've been in this town more than 3 years now - and I'm glad she's seen it.

It was 10 days of Dalal-Parekh craziness, made all the more fun with some extra Small action. Jonti's parents rented a massive cottage in the Lake District and took us out on some walks.

Looking over Lake Windermere in Ambleside.
Dramatic skies.

Alan, Jonti's father, took us all on a walk out to Rydal cave.
We saw bats. We think

There is a strange British obsession with horrible American foodlike substances. I suppose it's because things like aerosolised cheese can't legally be sold as food here. They brought Easy Cheese for Jonti's cousin Philip, and my friends Neil & Joe. Look how happy it made Joe.

Joe eating a gross thing
and very happy about it.

This trip was the first time my sister met my husband.

I still think that's a really strange thing. I never never thought I would have such a tale to tell.

I still feel bad that she wasn't able to be at the wedding. I know we're going to have another one in Atlanta. But I also know it upset her. And I can't fix it, of course, because it's happened.

I was happy to see all of them - my niece and nephew are growing up and that's awesome and weird. But more than anything, I was really glad that I got to see my sister. I feel like I broke that secret pact we made when we were little, that pact where we said, "I promise I will not let you miss anything."

We didn't make a pact. But I still feel like I broke something.

-------

They flew out on a Tuesday morning - and that night, Jonti & I went out to see Mark Z Danielewski do a Q&A. Danielewski is the author of House of Leaves, a book that will change how you think about books in a good fun theoretical ambitious critical excellent way.

He's the kind of writer who attracts PhD theses like banana-eating attracts mosquitoes. It was a strange Q&A, as his fans lined up to ask him questions about how obscure French theorists inform his work. And he answered with grace and intelligence, shifting from an incredibly theoretical question to a profoundly human answer. He said things like, "When people ask me how I know a book is done, all I can tell them is that ... it's when the story starts to eat itself."

We had lovely weather for the Easter holiday earlier this month. Jonti & I tried to go for a countryside bicycle ride, but we failed at that pretty miserably and ended up pushing our bikes up a seriously steep hill on an A road, riding along another A road, and eventually realising we had no idea where the track we were supposed to be heading toward started. It wasn't a total wash, though - we sat in Mossley park, in beautiful sunshine, warm and bright & we read our books and had a lovely picnic.

The next day, Katherine decided to drive us out to the beach! We went out to Formby and had *another* picnic! I know. Two picnics in two days. I'm totally spoiled.

I feel that because I grew up in landlocked Atlanta, I'm still kind of a kid at the beach. Water, the seaside, sand, seashells - these things are all still really surprising to me. Yes, I spent two years living in Sydney - but I didn't spend much time at the beaches. In my experience, most of Sydney's beaches were too busy & the water was too full of used tampons.

Katherine and Jonti walked ahead of me, as I constantly stopped to pick up seashells. Muttering to myself, "Oh, that's a pretty one... I wonder what animal this is??... This one has a hinge... Oh, neat." Occasionally, I yelled. "JONTI! WHAT'S THIS ONE?"

He would slowly walk back to me, take the shell from me, and quietly say, "I don't know. It's just a shell."

He spent his childhood coming to Formby regularly & he's totally over the shells. So's Katherine. But I took a whole bunch home and washed them and I'm going to keep them forever. Well, probably more like for awhile.

Near Formby beach is a red squirrel sanctuary. Red squirrels are indigenous to Britain. They have been losing habitat and food to the invasive species known as the North American grey squirrel... in other words, because of squirrels that are from where I'm from.

It makes me sad, because I love grey squirrels. I love their bushy tails and their awesome jumping skills. When they stand up on their hind legs, they look like they're wearing little white shirts. I love them. But here, in the UK, they are a bad thing. I was hoping that red squirrels wouldn't be as cute in real life as grey squirrels, so that I could go on loving the hell out of all the grey squirrels I see in Manchester. For cuteness.

But then, I saw three red squirrels in the woods near Formby Beach. And oh my god, they are even cuter than grey squirrels. They have elfin ears, y'all. They are smaller than greys, and they have wispy little bushy tails. THEY ARE GINGER. They are the best squirrel. I dare you to find a better squirrel.

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We've been going to see lots of music lately. Sounds From The Other City (SFTOC) is a Salford-based music festival, with loads of Salford pubs and music venues hosting all-day gigs. This year was SFTOC's 10-year anniversary. They made decorations & party hats out of posters from previous years.

SFTOC provided an excellent excuse to see a bunch of venues I wouldn't otherwise have seen, like Salford University's Peel Hall. Gorgeous entryway.

It was a really fun day, and though I really only 'discovered' one band that I really like from it, that band is so metal awesome, they've made me wonder whether I am at heart truly just a metal fan.*

They are Sly and the Family Drone. They are two drummers, who are proficient & work together to play across each others' drum sets at the same time, as well as a mixing desk of some sort (played by one of the drummers) & a dude making strange noises through a harmonica fitted to a microphone. A video on Youtube will not give you the experience of watching these guys. They are some new kind of music, like metal-jazz or something, and they are super awesome. They played just outside this strange teepee or cut-up tent or whatever it is with cool light projections all over it.

We also went to see Future Islands the other night, on the recommendation of Miss Laura Barton. Have y'all already heard of Future Islands? They were a great show.

-------

Oh, and I've been working a lot lately. I left my contract at the BBC to go freelance and get back into production, and I've been working fairly solid since then. It's an exciting and scary time to go freelance again - but I think I'm ready.

-------

And I'm keeping some news in my back pocket, so I can post more than once a month. Promise.

23 March 2014

When I moved to Manchester, back in 2010, I was particularly intrigued by this big, round building in the center of town.

The Central Library.

Ewan MacColl, that famous English folk singer, songwriter, communist, labour activist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer, was at the Library on its opening day. I imagine everyone in the city must have immediately fallen in love with its beautiful, Classical, Pantheon-inspired stature.

But I had just missed it... in 2010, before I got here, it was closed for renovations - set to open in 2014. I didn't think I would get to see it. My visa was meant to expire in February 2014. I'd be back in Atlanta, or somewhere else by the time the renovations were done. I thought, if I ever visited Manchester again, maybe in a few years, I would like to wander around it.

But there was no way I'd get to actually use it, no way I would ever get used to it being open, being available, being just another resource in this great town.

It was asbestos-ridden, I'd heard from friends who'd lived here longer. It was crumbling. I've only ever gazed at it from the outside, unsure what secrets it might hold.

Yesterday, it opened.

And it is stunning.

The entrance is called the Shakespeare Hall, filled with stained glass and natural light and smooth pale stone.

The building, it turns out, is 6 stories high, with a massive reading room in the center. They've put the NorthWest Film Archive in, with little viewing booths & there's the BFI Mediatheque in, too. There's a performance space. Event spaces. A cafe.

The ceiling window lets in plenty of white daylight.

I love the old signage they've left on the stones in the reading room.

The reading room is so perfectly round that if you stand in the center, you'll hear voices from other parts of the room. It's a weird, ghostly sensation, talking to someone you can't see, listening in on people who don't know you can hear them. As an audio nerd, I tried to get some recordings... but I'm not sure how they came out. I stood in the center, listening for a long time. The whole room echoes and echoes - apparently, when the building first opened in 1934, it was a big problem for people who came to the library to... you know... read. Newly developed sound-absorbing material has helped quite a lot.The corridors that swing around the reading room are stunning, too. So many intriguing views and angles. It's really beautiful.

This corridor leads from the Central Library to Manchester's Town Hall, another of my favourite, favourite buildings in the world. It's a pretty glamorous corridor, hey?

Outdoors, there used to be an open walkway between the Library and Town Hall.

Sadly, the Council have decided to enclose Library Walk in a cage of glass, allowing them to gate & and lock it at night, under the guise of 'public safety.' I mean, sure, Victoria Park is where students are regularly reporting sexual assault and theft - but if you want a way to keep homeless people away from a recently renovated building, I guess you have to claim it's for 'public safety.' 'Public control' sounds more accurate to me. Of course, the places where Greater Manchester Police most often tweet about violent crime in the city are nowhere near Library Walk - but why let that in the way of gating off public space from the kind of people you'd rather not hang out near pretty public buildings?And therein lies my, and many people's, concern. The Central Library is a public building. It is not just meant to be a gorgeous, formalist, beautiful building. It should, at its heart, be a library. A resource. From what I saw, on most floors of the library, there just weren't all that many... books.

They've done something really nice with the music collection - there are musical instruments around it, so people can have a go playing the sheet music. There's a drum kit, a piano. That's neat and I rather like it.

But the main lending library is stuck down in the basement of the building. With no natural light, the part that people will use most is worst placed.

And while event spaces and film viewing booths are great, I'm not sure the new Central Library actually holds the same collection it once did. Only one floor of the newly opened building has stacks of reference books. In 1968, the Central Library had nearly 1.66 million volumes. How many more must it have collected since? Manchester's Central Library was famous as a public, not university-based, library for its non-fiction reference investment and collection.

They did do a cool thing with the stacks - famous faces from Manchester's history are on them, and when you open one stack or close another, you either disjoin or join up the images. This image is Rutherford, of atom-breaking fame, with a face divided by books.

But books cost money and space to store. Those books are being stored in a warehouse now. They haven't been pulped. Yet. They also haven't been catalogued, so the public don't know which books are there... and therefore can't request them. I'm worried that in five or ten years, when no one has used them because no one can see them - the city will feel justified in actually pulping them. I like the new Central Library - I think it's a beautiful restoration of a gorgeous building. I like that it's got film viewing booths and event spaces. But in the course of its renovations, it's lost a lot of its non-fiction reference books. It seems like it might have become a glorified internet cafe. It's supposed to be a library. Where are all the books?